We were lucky enough to see Hamilton on Broadway yesterday. I’m presumptuous enough to write a review , if only to record my reactions for myself to solidify the memory of an amazing experience.

So yes, of course it was wonderful and moving. The hype, of course, is that it’s “even better than you expect” even when you expect it to be better than you expect. In some regards that’s true, but in some points, if I am to be honest, I was a little disappointed. (Some of that may be because so many roles were swapped around to cover understudies and standbys.) Overall, though, it was wonderful and worth the long wait.

The lighting was particularly amazing. At times, it functioned as scenery; at times, it was one of the dancers; at times, it was a Greek chorus commenting on the action. (It even provided a little “post-credits bonus” on the way out of the theater.)

The cast is clearly the hardest-working set of actors on Broadway. It’s not just Alexander Hamilton who is non-stop; the company is constantly singing, dancing (with amazing precision and a rich vocabulary of gesture), bringing sets and props on and offstage, miming additional props (rowing Hamilton across the Hudson stood out), and creating a world ex nihilo.

In many ways, this felt like a revival. The original cast is mostly gone, and the audience knows their performance intimately through the Original Cast Recording, through videos of numbers being performed in various special venues (e.g., at the Tony Awards), through the Hamiltome, etc. That gives the current cast the opportunity to reinterpret their roles; and given how much the roles were developed in workshop, this is practically a necessity. Only Daveed Diggs could perform Lafayette/Jefferson as Daveed Diggs. This is a drawback in places (comparing Brandon Victor Dixon’s performance of “The Room Where It Happens” to how I imagine Leslie Odom Jr. did it, based on how it’s been described, is fundamentally unfair, but inevitable) but in others it means the show already has the chance to explore multiple possible interpretations. Bryan Terrell Clark’s “History Has Its Eyes on You” had a completely new interpretation in my mind. Lexi Lawson’s “Burn” left scorch marks where the recording of Pippa Sou was much more smoldering — both are impassioned performances; each brings to light a different reading of the character.

Lawson’s Eliza was wonderful overall, and the highlight of this performance. She covered so much emotional ground, and pretty much whenever she was singing, I was crying. In “Helpless” it was tears of joy at the power of Eliza’s love; in “Burn” it was the rawness of her fury; in “Stay Alive (Reprise)” it was her strength of will and the devastating moment when that failed her; in “It’s Quiet Uptown” it was her silent grace; and in “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story’, it was her steadfast faith and hope. Lawson inhabited all of those moments with such surety that you forgot you were watching a show, and her performance was her own, not a copy of Soo’s.

Mandy Gonzalez was also a standout as Angelica, although she’s not given as much opportunity as Eliza to play a fully fleshed out character, and so it’s hard for me to distinguish her performance from Renée Elise Goldsberry’s on the recording.

At the performance we saw, Jon Rua filled in as Hamilton. He was quite good, although at times it felt like his attention was too focused on getting every word to come out right, rather than on the nuances of the performance. I also got a “Brian Williams” vibe from him, which I found distracting at times, although Heather says she doesn’t see that. But those are minor quibbles; his performance was fine, just not outstanding. (Again, he’s the standby for the role, so one can be forgiving.)

Dixon’s Burr and Bryan Terrell Clark’s Washington were excellent. Both men delivered their songs well, portrayed their characters in ways that shed new light on their motivations, and made their roles their own.

Two performances, on the other hand, were too campy for my taste. Jevon McFerrin’s Jefferson lacked the gravitas needed to make him believable as an opponent of Hamilton. And Andrew Chappelle’s King George, a role that (in my opinion) calls for sly camp, was too broadly painted. (It didn’t help that his singing and affect were both flat.) (Note that McFerrin is usually the alternate for Hamilton, and Chappelle is a standby for several roles.)

The choreography of “Helpless”/”Satisfied”, and again during “Hurricane”, were two standout moments where “it was even better than I expected, and I expected a lot.” The transition from “Hurricane” into “The Reynolds Pamphlet” made me gasp. A moment that surprised me with the elegance of the blocking was the voters chatting in “The Election of 1800.”

In general, the company was always doing interesting believable detail work in the background; this is a show that would reward attending over and over and over again, if that were possible. (I really hope when they eventually release the video that they shot last year, they do it in a format that allows the viewer to choose which camera to follow.)

_Thirty_ years ago, Jon and I met on our first day at MIT and became fast friends.

And of course a bat mitzvah is inherently a marking of the passage of years.

So tonight my thoughts turn towards how the Torah, and in particular how these two parshiot, Ki Tisa and Parah, expect us to view time.

Ki Tisa starts by continuing the theme of the last two parshiyot, with detailed instructions for the construction of the mishkan and its vessels. That concludes with the injunction to keep the Shabbat:

Six _days_ may work be done, but on the seventh _day_ there shall be a sabbath of complete rest, holy to Hashem; whoever does work on the _day_ of the sabbath shall be put to death.

While _we_ tend to think of Shabbat as a _weekly_ occurrence, the wording _here_ is six days, then the seventh day; the word Yom recurs as “b’yom ha-shabbat”. “Day” is clearly a key word in this pasuk.

Our parasha then transitions directly into the episode of the molten calf, which begins

And Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: What is the meaning of that which is written: “And the people saw that Moses delayed [boshesh] to come down from the mount” (Exodus 32:1)? Do not read the word boshesh; rather, read it as ba’u shesh, the sixth [hour] has arrived. When Moses ascended on High, he told the Jewish people: In forty days, at the beginning of the sixth hour, I will arrive.

Aharon attempts to placate the people, “Vayomer, chag lashem _machar_”, a festival to Hashem will be _tomorrow_. And after the Leviim kill those who committed idol worship, Moshe says to them: v’latet Aleichem HAYOM b’racha – that Hashem should place a blessing on you THIS DAY; and the Torah continues, “Vayhi _mimachorat_”, and it occurred on the _morrow_

We can see that throughout this section of the parasha, from the introduction of Shabbat through the end of the episode of the molten calf, the Torah insists that we perceive time in units of _days_.

There’s a similar linguistic focus on _days_ in Maftir Parah, with its emphasis on seven _days_ (not referred to as a week), specifically the third day and the seventh day. Mafitr Parah is concerned with how the individual is rendered separate from — and then reenters — the community after encountering death, and perhaps in that context the focus on processing each day one at a time, not as a week-long clump, earns the Torah its Talmudic nickname of Rachamana, the merciful one.

But the echo of a day-centric worldview between the Maftir and the main Parasha is striking.

Returning to Ki Tisa, Moshe next experiences a sublime transformative event, an encounter with the Eternal. After pleading first for the continuity of Bnei Israel, Moshe puts in a special plea for himself. He asks to see God’s glory; God famously replies “No human can see me and live” but promises to hide Moshe in the cleft of a rock. Moshe re-ascends Har Sinai with the second set of tablets, and then God crosses before him: Vayaavor Hashem al Panav… (which Ramban explains as וטעם ויעבר ה’ על פניו שקיים אני אעביר כל טובי על פניך. — and the reason “God crossed before him” was to fulfil the earlier verse, “I shall cause all my goodness to cross before you”)

And he [Moshe] wrote down on the tablets the terms of the covenant, the Ten Utterances.

Moshe has learned to step back from the immediate pressures of “this day” and to peer along the arc of history. He has gained the perspective needed for God to entrust him with the sacred task of writing on the tablets as God’s shaliach, of becoming the intermediary through which the mesorah is passed down.

___, you are now becoming, like Moshe, an intermediary. You are no longer merely a student receiving Torah, but as a Jewish adult you are now a full participant in the continuing millennia-old conversation about what God wants of us. Moshe’s experience compels us to confront the question of how to see the perspective of those millennia with one eye and, with the other, the demands of each day – the needs of _today_.

After the Divine revelation at Sinai, we received the promise: וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם. They will build me a holy place and I will dwell amongst them. But the Torah’s detailed instructions laden with exact measurements can feel like a distraction; similarly, its emphasis at the beginning of our parsha on seeing each day as standing alone may teach us that the people were so focused on the day-to-day minutae that they lost sight of the big picture and stumbled into sin.

J___, one thing that your father and I have in common is that we are both, to put it politely, detail-oriented people. And I know that preparing for a bat mitzvah not only requires an attention to detail; it also involves counting the days. But becoming a bat mitzvah is not about the day. It’s not about the week and its parasha. It’s not even about the year you attain your Jewish adulthood. It’s about the rest of your life.

My wish for you this Shabbat is that you continue to find balance in the many time horizons and levels through which you experience Jewish life. May the details not distract you from the overarching spiritual beauty of our inheritance, and may the big picture not wash out the details that keep it vibrant.